Video kills the old-media stars

CHARLESTON, S.C. -- In a debate billed by CNN and YouTube as the “first of its kind,” eight Democratic presidential candidates took video questions Monday night from ordinary and unusual Americans -- and alternated between a sober dispute over the Iraq war and giddy exchanges about guns, clothes and Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich’s beautiful young wife.

Amid the entertainment of a talking snowman and rapping education advocate, however, the candidates drew clear distinctions on crucial questions of foreign policy in a debate that circled repeatedly around Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's positions on the war in Iraq.

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“We don't want more loss of American life and Iraqi life as we attempt to withdraw, and it is time for us to admit that it's going to be complicated, so let's start it now,” the New York senator said.

“I have done extensive work on this. And the best estimate is that we can probably move a brigade a month, if we really accelerate it, maybe a brigade and a half or two a month. That is a lot of months,” she said, offering rare detail on the difficulty of a rapid withdrawal.

President Bush’s “surge” calls for stationing 20 combat brigades in Iraq, numbering between 3,500 and 5,000 troops each, along with thousands of support personnel.

Clinton was agreeing with Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, who ridiculed New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson’s goal of bringing all the soldiers home within six months.

“Let's get something straight. It's time to start to tell the truth,” Biden bellowed in response to Richardson’s optimism, appearing to thrive in the looser atmosphere of the YouTube debate.

Clinton also took criticism from Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois for her pre-war judgment.

“The time for us to ask how we were going to get out of Iraq was before we went in,” he said. “And that is something that too many of us failed to do.”

What might have been a clean blow to Clinton on an important distinction between the two, however, suffered when Obama agreed to a demand from a bearded YouTube user, Californian Stephen Sixta, that candidates promise to meet with the leaders of Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea and Iran within the first year of a presidency.

Obama promptly received lectures on foreign policy from Clinton and former Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina.

“Well, I will not promise to meet with the leaders of these countries during my first year,” Clinton said. “I don't want to be used for propaganda purposes. … Certainly, we're not going to just have our president meet with Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez and, you know, the president of North Korea, Iran and Syria until we know better what the way forward would be.”

(Though Obama answered the question affirmatively, his chief adviser, David Axelrod, later insisted Obama did not mean he would meet the dictators "personally.")

The debate also offered candidates a chance to poke fun at the old media’s focus on the superficial.

Sen. Chris Dodd of Connecticut used his own video time to present a comic sketch of a reporter asking about his white hair.

And Edwards presented a montage of scenes of poverty and crisis as the title song from the musical “Hair” played, a contrast between the media’s attention to his own expensive haircuts and his campaign’s focus on poverty.

Edwards, though, returned the conversation to the superficial with a joke at the end of the debate, in response to a demand by Jason Koop of Colorado Springs, Colo., that the candidates recite what each liked and disliked about his or her neighbor on the stage.

“I admire what Sen. Clinton has done for America, what her husband did for America,” Edwards said, before turning his attention to her coral-colored blazer. “I'm not sure about that coat.”

Biden, in particular, seemed to simultaneously detest and enjoy what he called a “ridiculous exercise.” He was asked to praise Ohio Rep. Kucinich.